People with type 1 or type 2 diabetes can develop eye disease as a result of having diabetes. One of the most common diabetic eye diseases is diabetic retinopathy, which is damage to the blood vessels of the light-sensitive tissue at the back of the eye, known as the retina. Eye exams can produce images of the back of the eye and trained medical professionals use those images to diagnose and treat diabetic retinopathy.
Many of the current methods used to produce the images of the back of the eye, known as a fundus, suffer from various deficiencies, often producing imperfect images that can complicate the diagnostic procedure. Traditional imaging techniques use a Bayer-patterned color filter array imaging sensor. Such techniques have low sensitivity and the resulting image often suffers demosaic artifacts caused by low color resolution. Additionally, many of the current methods require the dilation of the patient's eyes, which is uncomfortable and inconvenient.